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Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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Archive for the ‘LD #12 – The Tower – 2008’ Category

Search Treasur In The Cave My Entry For This MiniLD70 ,This Game Is Intended For All People Of Any Age , You Can Play This Game On Windows Or Linux And Also On Android.The Aim Of This Game Is To Discover The Treasure,Follow The Arrows Drawing On the wall To Direct You To The Aim…ENJOY!!! Thanks all.

My Page For Game : http://ludumdare.com/compo/minild-70/?action=preview&uid=111717

My Page For Game : http://ludumdare.com/compo/minild-70/?action=preview&uid=111717

I want to share something with you guys and get your feedback. Feel free to agree or disagree. But before I continue, I just want to say that I’ve participated in 8Ludum Dares so far, and they’re what I look forward to, I love them. Ok, now I’ll give my little spiel.

After making your game in the 48/72 Hour Time Limit, we get to check out and Rate other people’s games. When rating somebody’s game, we are allowed to give them x out of 5 stars in 8 different Categories. These Categories include: Innovation, Fun, Theme, Graphics, Audio, Humor, Mood, and most importantly, Overall. I’m going to talk more about the Overall category in a minute. Let me just talk about something else first:

As many of you may have noticed, probably for a while now, your results don’t seem very honest. The results you get may seem surprising, this could be in a bad way, or in a good way. You’re either pretty disappointed, or you’re really happy. This is because you didn’t get a ton of votes (i.e.: ~20-70 votes, which is what a lot of people end up getting). Think about it, there were about 2,800 other games out there. Do you think that with 50 votes out of the 2,800 entries you’ll get a really honest evaluation? You shouldn’t, because unfortunately, that’s not the case.

If 5 people rate your game and they all give you a 5 on Fun, the average would be a 5/5. If 10 people rate your game and 8 of them give you a 5 on Fun, and the other 2 give you a 4, the average would be a 4.8/5. Now the game with an average of 5/5 is ranked higher than the game with an average of 4.8/5. But the game with an average of 4.8/5 should be ranked higher because it had similar scores, and more people played it. Now I’m pretty sure that in the end the game’s categories aren’t ranked based on just the amount of stars given but still, I just wanted to give you something to think about. The rankings aren’t all that honest. I noticed that many of the Top Ranked games only had about ~30-70 votes. You’ll see that the games that got the most votes weren’t up there in the Top 100. But they did, however, have more real honest evaluations, while the others with ~30-70 votes were just lucky enough to get a handful of good ratings which therefore gave them higher rankings. The Top 100 are great games, no doubt, but are they the best out of the 2,800? We don’t really know for sure.

Ok, now I’m going to talk about this Overall category. The site says that your game is ranked overall based on your Overall category ratings. Do you think that we should be allowed to rate the Overall category? The Overall category should be based on the other categories rounded up. The site should give us the Overall Rating, not us. Here’s just one reason why: I’ve seen many people give a game great ratings, like 4-5 stars on every category, and then they would give the Overall category a 3. Umm… What? Shouldn’t you base the Overall category on the other categories? If you gave all the other categories 5 stars, then why would you give the Overall category 4 stars? The Average Overall Rating would be a 5, so give it a 5. But since people don’t always do that, let the Robots do the math and give us the Overall Rating, not the Humans.

I’m not entirely sure how Mike (Founder of Ludum Dare; Support him on Patreon!) can make the evaluations more honest because you can’t just have 2,800 people play all 2,800 games, that’s just ridiculous. But it’s just something to think about.

I have to be honest, I mostly didn’t participate in the last LD because I wasn’t a huge fan of the theme. I know, I suck, but it’s the past now…

….. But now, to make up for my laziness, I am bringing the past back!

Starting this Friday, I’m having a Quarter Quell (#HungerGamesReference). For a week, I will make a game based on one of the 25 first topics, and it would be cool if you guys joined me in this effort! If not, it’s cool lol.

You can pick any topic (or topics) from the random list below. I went to www.random.org/sequences/ and randomly selected 10 out of the 25 numbers:

So the topics are:

Advancing Wall of DoomSwarmsBuild the level you playEvolutionPreparation — Set it up, let it goIt’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!The TowerInfectionGrowth … <– “Grow”, also this May’s optional theme for One Game A MonthRoads

I think standard LD rules should apply, minus the week to do it. I plan to do this alone, but you can be in a team if you so desire. If you want to participate, post in the comments of this post your intent to do so… and share your finish products when you’re done!

If any of you decide to participate with me, let’s see what awesomeness we can create!

It’s only 1 AM, but having never programmed a basic platformer before, my meager attempt to get jumping has failed miserably for the past 2 hours or so. I should probably finalize an idea first. All of them are probably unoriginal, though I have a few scenarios I think are interesting. I think that’s what I’ll do. I keep of thinking of ideas and then settle on making the game on the most interesting one, not necessarily the one I think I can get done on time. How else am I supposed to improve if I don’t push myself? For, now, G’night!

My LD12 entry, Cat Stacker, has grown up and now features assorted fruit. Also, instead of the original tetrisy controls, you can click and drag the current piece around with no time pressure (press A and D to rotate). There are 20 levels and it get’s pretty tough. Good luck! (^ _ ^)/

I will just apologize in advance, as the next level may shock and dismay..

Cannon Hearts Tower is my entry for miniLD6, the secondary theme is ‘LD12: The Tower’ and the tertiary theme is ‘miniLD5: Cover someone else’s game’. This is a cover of Sivart13’s game for LD12: “Cannon Hates Tower”.

Use up and down to aim your cannon and hold space before releasing space.

This mini game will be used in the LDCollab framework as a single level, with the other miniLD6 entries.

This first version does not use score files.

The Max Score is 1000. Post your best score in the comments. I’ve gotten 650.

I wasted about 10 hours trying to figure out how to integrate the ragdoll physics into the Ogre engine. I broke down and tried using the OgreOde ragdoll example, but compiling is a nightmare with different versions of Ogre and ODE. So I decided to scrap that for now. Instead of ragdoll physics, the player basically lays down flat on the ground. Its good enough I guess.

Since I wasted alot of time on the physics I have to cut some of the features such as curved roads. I have to integrate sound into the game still and some sort of menu for game startup and death. Then ill try making at least 2 more levels. So I think a total of 3 levels will be good enough.

Thanks to everyone who played my LD12 entry, Mr Blocker. As a number of people observed (myself included), it’s not much fun. Partly this was because I was very limited on time, so I deliberately chose a very simple concept so that I could finish in time.

As the game stands, once you have a reasonable idea of how the disasters work, it’s basically a matter of coming up with a strategy to work around them and following that. The simplicity of the game means that there is little variety in useful strategies. Following a strategy just means dropping blocks in the planned places, so there is not much skill or variety in that either.

My original idea regarding the style of play was that disasters should be unstoppable: the player either builds towers specifically to be destroyed by disasters, or builds towers in such a way that the effect will be minimal. A number of people suggested adding a way to avoid disasters, or allowing a level to be completed as soon as the targets were met, rather than after the time expired. That goes against my original idea, but it might make the game more interesting.

I might release an updated version with tidied code, a readme and key repeat for dropping blocks. Thanks to Morre for pointing out the lack of automatic key repeat; I use a strange keyboard with that built in, so I didn’t notice. I won’t be adding any more levels or other features because I don’t think the game would be entertaining for long enough for them to be worthwhile.

The only complicated part of the code is that which determines whether the targets for the level have been met after the time expires. There is a little complexity in the code to determine what gets destroyed in a disaster. Mostly, the code is fairly straightforward.

Because of the simple nature of the game, I thought there might be some entertainment in working out how disasters behave. However, this seems to have caused some people confusion and frustration. In case anyone is interested, here is how they actually behave and how to deal with them:

I too was waiting until after seeing the final results before I would post my post-mortem.

First I’d like to say well done to everyone who took part and completed a game within the time limit, and thank you to everyone for giving me honest reviews. I had great fun taking part and learned an awful lot about game development during and after the contest.

Quite literally, postMORTEM. ANyway, after reading the comments, seeing my ratings and my own opionins, I’m ready to do this. Maybe next time I’ll write this during the compo, but I only decided to do it now.

The good:

– I got a game released. I wasn’t really expecting to get one done, but I did.

– The gameplay. WIth GM, collison detecting/stopping you from moving in only one direction can be tough. I pulled it off though.

– The tower and key sprites. I’m not very good at computer art, and not much better and paper art, so these were pretty good sprites for me. I am thinking that making part of the key in 3d would be good, but as of now, I’m just learning to use Blender, so during the creation part, I couldn’t have done it.

The bad:

– The player sprite and the wall sprite. I could have done better with those.

-The game itself. It needed more levels and, quite obviously (:P), a game over/you win screen.

-The fact that I used GM to make it. I wanted to use SDL to make it, but I had no time.

Overall, if I added more levels, more detail and more traps, I think that it could become sort of fun.